1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to a system and methods of transferring clinical data from one or more sending applications to one or more dictation systems. Specifically, it relates to a system and methods of processing jobs, each job including transferring clinical data generated from one or more sending applications associated with the one or more data sources to at least one dictation system for use in generating reports at the at least one dictation system.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a typical hospital environment, a medical technician or a radiologist performs tests on a patient to measure some vital statistics using a modality or modality equipment such as, for example, an ultrasound machine. When the radiologist performs the test, the modality generates results that may be in a standard structured data such as, for example, DICOM Structured Report (SR) or Health Level-7 (HL7) messages. The results are then memorialized on paper, either manually by the medical technician or printed on the paper using an imaging device communicatively connected with the modality. To transfer the numerical data generated by the modality, the radiologist may read or dictate the results on the paper into a dictation system. The dictation system then receives the results, transcribes the numerical data and generates reports using the transcribed data.
Dictation is not an optimal workflow solution for reporting numerical results to a reporting tool. Transcription errors may occur when dictating measurements from handwritten paper forms. Further, recording the measurements from the modality, printing them and then having a user dictate the printed measurements into a dictation system to generate reports may be time consuming and require human resources. One existing solution to help more efficiently process DICOM content and reduce risks of errors involves an application that receives DICOM messages, normalizes the DICOM content and prepares it for use in generating reports using dictation systems.
However, modalities that generate HL7 content still require the manual process of printing the HL7 content and having the HL7 results dictated into a dictation system by a user. Moreover, HL7 content may contain multiple segments that require certain pre-processing in order to select the desired data to be formatted and forwarded to a dictation system.
Accordingly, there is a need for a system and methods of more efficiently selecting HL7 specific data and transferring the selected HL7 data to a dictation system in a format compatible with report templates contained in the dictation system and without the potential errors that may occur when dictating displayed, handwritten or printed modality results into the dictation system.
There is also a need for a system and methods to efficiently manage the sending of the values from the modalities to the dictation system that will allow the user to track if the values have been successfully sent to the dictation system. Other systems typically process jobs in a first in, first out system. However, some customers need to have the formatted clinical data still be preserved even if there was a failure in the sending of the formatted data to the dictation system. As such, there is a need for a system and methods for tracking if the formatted data has been successfully sent to the dictation system, and to manage the formatted data if the sending has failed.